Uniphore Software Systems, which develops voice biometrics and speech analytics software in 30 global and Indian languages, is running a pilot with taxi and auto-rickshaw drivers in Delhi-National Capital Region to see if its speech detection technology can be an effective English-language teaching tool. The project is for a telecom company that wants to offer English learning capsules over the phone to its subscribers.

The seven-year-old company, incubated at IIT-Madras’ Rural Technology and Business Incubator, boasts of 70 enterprise clients in industries like healthcare, banking, agriculture, financial services using several of its products that were originally developed for rural markets. “Designing technology for rural customers turned out to be a good business bet,” said Umesh Sachdev, cofounder and chief executive of Uniphore. “We realized we had developed technology for the harshest of conditions.”

Uniphore’s kitty of products for voice biometrics, speech analytics and virtual assistance has found takers also in South-East Asia and the Middle East; the company’s now targeting the US market. Its technology has earned it the backing of investors IDG Ventures, Yournest Fund, Stata Ventures, Indian Angel Network and Infosys cofounder Kris Gopalakrishnan. Overall, Uniphore had raised about Rs 22 crore in venture capitalfunding, as per its filings for April with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.

Entrepreneurs like Sachdev herald a movement where the adoption of technology to solve problems at scale for large masses of low-income and rural or small town users is becoming more commonplace. Companies like Forus Health, Artoo, NextDrop, AquaSafi UE LifeSciences, NowFloats and Skymet are among those spearheading this.

“Technology will be a game-changer as far as going to market is concerned and people at all levels will use it,” said Amit Bhatia, chief executive of industry body Indian Impact Investors Council (IIIC). “In healthcare, for example, technology is bringing prices down and a doctor doesn’t have to be there at every primary interaction… Technology allows social enterprises to scale, create low-cost technologies and products that people can leverage.” Venture capital investors injected $480 million (about Rs 3,200 crore) into tech and non-tech social enterprises in 2014, compared with $235 million in the previous year, according to IIIC.

Bengaluru-based Artoo is rolling out a virtual assistant for field agents of non-banking financial companies to manage daily tasks and schedule appointments with potential borrowers. “There is a big frenzy out there. The one who succeeds will be the one who can give out loans in a day,” said Sameer Segal, cofounder and CEO of Artoo.

Artoo, which originally developed customer relationship management software for field agents of microfinance institutions, is repositioning itself to cash in on the big boom involving the micro, medium, and small enterprise (MSME) sector—or the ‘missing middle’—that is in dire need of credit. The sector faces a credit gap of Rs 3 lakh crore according to industry estimates. In 2014, more than 400 million people borrowed money, but fewer than one in seven were approved for a formal loan, according to a report by Omidyar Network, the philanthropic investment firm of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

When Artoo’s team went back to the drawing board to design the virtual assistant, they had to take into account a significant shift in the behavior and usage patterns of this target audience. Both borrowers and field agents were digitally savvier and comfortable with applications such as Facebook and Whatsapp, said Segal. Now, something as rudimentary yet time-consuming as collecting a borrower’s contact details can be captured by taking a picture of a shop’s signage with this product, which uses optical character recognition technology. As the new economy throws up a bagful of opportunities—many at the intersection of consumer internet/technology with potential for scaled social impact—designing technology for a grassroots audience requires an outside-in approach with a deep understanding of local contexts and needs.

“Technology by itself is usually not a solution,” said Phoebe Sengers, associate professor in information science and technology studies at Cornell University. “You also need to think about how that technology is going to fit into people’s existing practices, what institutions or organisations might be affected by your technology, how it will affect relationships, be marketed and sold or otherwise made available and understandable to people you want to reach.” Cultural variables apart, entrepreneurs say it is important to design technology that will function seamlessly in vastly differing environmental and geographic conditions. When Uniphore’s founders were developing Akeira, an interactive voice response software, they realized that their main challenge was not language but dialect and accent, which could vary every 100 kilometers.

“(Akeira) needed the ability to handle different dialects. Also, calls coming from far-flung areas come with background noise—the signalto-noise ratio was skewed,” said CEO Sachdev. Today, Akeira supports 150 dialects globally and is used by large enterprise clients including SKS Microfinance, ITC and World Health Partners.

When Bengaluru-based Forus Health developed 3nethra, a portable pre-screening ophthalmologic device, the company ensured it was rugged enough to weather arid terrain or rain forests. The device requires 8-10 watts of power, can work with solar panels, costs a fraction of western models, and can be used by minimally trained technicians. To date, doctors in 20 countries have used the device to test some 1.5 million people, said K Chandrasekhar, CEO at Forus.

The ‘base of the pyramid’—representing the largest but also the poorest socio-economic group—provides many contexts that have strong design constraints, which force a kind of creativity and fresh thought, Sengers said. But impact requires adoption at the very bottom. For this, technologists must put on a business hat to put together a model that they can convince small entrepreneurs to adopt. “As technology continues to make progress, solutions in the social sector become more and more feasible,” said Gururaj Deshpande, founder of Deshpande Foundation, an incubator for social businesses. “However, it takes a whole new breed of social entrepreneurs to convert the technology platform into solutions..

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